Liberty

CHAPTER TWENTY

Dawn had arrived but the sun was not yet up when the tractor hauling the container from Port Everglades pulled up to the mobile-home office at the golf course construction site. The driver got out of the truck and stretched, casually scanning the other rig parked there, the’dozers and backhoes and piles of pipe. He walked over to the office, rattled the locked door, checked his watch, looked around. Nguyen Duc Tran watched him through binoculars. The driver was wearing a faded Harley T-shirt, worn jeans, and cowboy boots.

The driver peed in the dirt, then took a seat on the single wooden step of the office and lit a cigarette.

Nguyen lowered the binoculars and carefully peered around the huge black tires of the earthmover he was lying under, looking for other people or cars or airplanes. He saw the sedan carrying Mohammed Mohammed and his two confederates drift to a stop on the street near the turnin to the site.

Nguygen used a finger to focus the binoculars. Three men in the car. Not FBI or police — they would have been in place before the container arrived; they would have learned its destination. Construction workers, perhaps, a few minutes early for work. Or Arab terrorists.

Mohammed Mohammed was also using binoculars. He didn’t see Nguyen Duc Tran lying under the distant earthmover, but he saw the driver plainly enough, sitting on the office step smoking and occasionally glancing at his watch. He studied the container again. At this distance with eight-power binoculars, he could just read the number on the side of the container. He studied it, repeated every number to himself.

Yes, that was the one.

He lowered the binoculars and wondered what he should do.

Mohammed removed his cell phone from his pocket and flipped it open. He fingered it idly while he considered his options.

There was the weapon he had been waiting for, and it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. He had not forgotten the container number nor had he gotten it twisted. That was the container. Perhaps there had been some mistake with the delivery manifest. Or someone was stealing it.

He looked at the keyboard of the telephone and dialed a number he had committed to memory. After the third ring a male voice answered. “Akram, this is Mohammed. Allah Akbar!”

The FBI was not monitoring Mohammed’s telephone, but it was monitoring Akram, who led the cell the FBI had designated as Number Fourteen. Unfortunately the man who normally listened to the conversations on monitored numbers was busy just then arranging communications between the police agencies and FBI agents who were shadowing the cells that Tulik thought were hot. This call was automatically recorded and would be listened to whenever the technician had time. He was busy now, and he was going to get a lot busier.

The driver got tired of waiting, so he fired up his tractor and began preparations to unhook the truck chassis that carried the container.

Nguyen divided his attention between the driver, the car parked on the street, and scanning in all the other directions. A sliver of sun peeped over the earth’s rim and bathed the scene in a golden light, but he didn’t notice.

The driver moved the tractor away from the chassis and left the engine idling. He walked behind it, tied up brake lines and electrical cords, then took a clipboard from the cab of the tractor and resumed his seat on the step of the office. He lit another cigarette.

Well, by God, there it was, Nguyen thought. All he had to do was go down there, sign the clipboard, hook up, and drive off.

The driver wasn’t going to let him sign for the load unless he had a key to the office, and he didn’t. He could always shoot the driver, of course, and throw his body into the container, but the people in the car on the street would see him do it. In any event, someone would start looking for the missing driver before long. And if those three watching from the street were indeed terrorists, they might get pissy when he tried to hook up and drive away.

Anxious as he was, Nguyen could only wait.

Mohammed Mohammed was feeling the burden of each passing minute. There sat the weapon, misdelivered or stolen. If he and his men drove over there and shot the driver, they could hook up the chassis to the tractor and drive off. Mohammed knew how to drive a truck — he had planned to drive the delivery truck to New York.

But what if this were a setup? What if there was a squad of heavily armed FBI agents clad in body armor hiding in the construction office or the weapon container?

He scanned the whole area again with his binoculars, looking for someone, something, anything. Another glance at his watch. Twelve minutes since he telephoned.

Akram should be here soon with three other men, all armed. With seven men, they would go get the weapon. If there were police or FBI agents hidden and waiting, they would kill them.

“We shouldn’t wait,” Yousef said, seeming to read his thoughts. “The construction workers will arrive soon, and they will call the police. We can’t kill all of them.”

Mohammed was torn. Would Akram arrive before the construction workers? Should he wait for Akram or go now?

Even as he weighed it, his eye registered a gleam of reflected light from one of the distant earthmovers. He aimed the binoculars, held them steady as possible, and sweetened up the focus. He could see the head and shoulders of a man lying beside a massive wheel. He, too, was holding binoculars. The flash had been the reflection of the rising sun in one of the lenses.

So they were waiting!

Myron A. Emerick was in his element. He sat in the command chair in the FBI operations center at the Hoover Building in Washington and listened to the reports of FBI agents, police SWAT units, and surveillance helicopters as they came in. A video feed from an airborne helicopter played on a giant screen.

The crew in the operations center was running simultaneous surveillances on nine cells of suspected terrorists in south Florida, all of whom were in cars or vans and driving north. Already the operation had tied up two hundred agents and local police, and more would soon be needed. The surveillances were as loose as possible, so the suspects wouldn’t know they were being followed.

One of the problems with using local police was their proclivity for whispering to local television crews that something was going down. It hadn’t happened yet this morning, but it might. It was a risk Emerick had to take. He had no choice; he had to let the terrorists lead him to the weapons. Every other option would take a lot more time. Once they knew the government was on to them the terrorists would either try to escape or stop dead, right where they were, and he wouldn’t find the weapons without a massive search.

Hob Tulik was in Florida, running things out of the antiterrorism task force offices; every now and then Emerick heard his voice on the circuit. Emerick’s deputy, Robert Pobowski, was standing by the duty officer, listening and making an occasional remark.

Emerick stretched his legs, then stood. In tense moments he found it difficult to sit.

As he paced he thought about the three telephone calls that had started the suspects in motion. If there were four weapons, why not four telephone calls?

Were there cells the FBI didn’t know about? That was the most likely answer. In all probability one of those unknown cells had received a call and was at this moment on its way to take delivery of a nuclear warhead.

But where?

Emerick stared at the map.

How could he cut through the knot, find the missing cells? The only thing he could think of was to inspect those weapons they could find, see why they weren’t found in customs and port inspections, and go from there. Everyone wants a magic bullet, but sometimes there aren’t any. Good, solid police work had turned up these three — that was what would be required to find the fourth.

When the president called in a few minutes, he would tell him that. Solid, competent, thorough, honest-to-God police work did the job every time. There was no substitute for it. Not now, not ever.

“Ten minutes, Inshallah,” Akram told Mohammed over the cell phone. “If you are where we think you are, it will take us ten minutes. If you are somewhere else, I do not know. Why was the weapon delivered there?”

Mohammed slammed the cover of the telephone closed, terminating the conversation. The fool! If the FBI were listening, he was telling them everything!

Well, Akram and his men might be here in ten minutes or they might not. Inshallah!

“We should shoot the driver and take the weapon,” Ali insisted. “I see only one man lying under that earthmover.”

“You see only one! But how many are there?” Yousef demanded. “Do you know?”

“Allah Akbar!” Ali roared. “We must trust to Allah and fight the kafirs! Allah is with us! There is the weapon!” He pointed at the container.

Mohammed was beside himself, unable to reach a decision. He was ready to give his life to smite the wicked Americans a mighty blow, not to die stupidly.

He was reaching for the ignition key, about to start the car and go for it, when a pickup passed the parked sedan and turned into the dirt road leading to the construction office. The man driving parked right beside the building and got out. He was about sixty, balding, with a magnificent gut hanging over his belt.

Mohammed used his binoculars. The delivery driver pointed to the container and offered some papers. The man from the pickup laid the papers on the hood of his truck, looked them over, then signed with a pen offered by the delivery driver.

After a handshake, the delivery driver walked toward his truck.

Another pickup entered the yard. A man got out carrying coffee in a Styrofoam cup. As the delivery driver climbed in the cab of his tractor two more vehicles arrived, one behind the other.

“They will get on with the day’s work,” Mohammed told Ali and Yousef. “We will give them fifteen minutes to disburse, then get that tractor and hook it to the chassis with the container.” A huge risk, and they would probably have to shoot some of these people, but they needed the weapon. They would shoot the watching man, too.

They were watching other vehicles arrive, counting people, when they realized that the parked tractor was now moving, backing up to the chassis. Ali saw the tractor move first.

As he pointed, Mohammed focused the binoculars. The driver was backing smartly, using the mirrors. A professional, obviously.

Where had he come from?

“When the chassis is on the rig, we drive in. Yousef, shoot the driver. Ali, watch for anyone who might have a weapon, like that man under the earthmover”—Mohammed had lost track of him—“and I’ll get in the cab. Yousef will ride with me. Ali will follow in the car.”

They checked their weapons, made sure they were loaded and the safeties were engaged.

“Allah Akbar,” Yousef whispered.

“Where is Akram?” Ali asked.

Mohammed watched the driver. He seemed to have all the connections attached between the container and the tractor. Now he was wiping his hands on his jeans, now he was walking around the rig one last time, checking …

“Let’s go.” He started the engine, engaged the transmission, and rolled around the corner, along the dirt road toward the buildings. Some people turned to look.

He braked in front of the trailer and Yousef opened the door and leaped out, an Uzi in his hand.

The man beside the rig shot Yousef twice before he could point his weapon. He collapsed in the dirt.

Mohammed Mohammed slammed the transmission into reverse and backed up with the accelerator on the floor, the engine screaming and dirt flying. A shot shattered the windshield.

Ali leaned out an open window and hosed a burst as Mohammed cranked the wheel to slew the rear of the car ninety degrees and jammed on the brakes. The open passenger door yawed wide. He pulled the transmission into drive as he spun the wheel, then he jammed the accelerator to the floor and fishtailed toward the boulevard. The passenger door slammed shut.

When he reached the street, Mohammed made a right turn and skidded the car to a stop. He and Ali bailed out with submachine guns in their hands. Mohammed ran across the street, took up a position directly across from the construction site entrance. The tractor-trailer rig was already in motion toward the street, accelerating, its engine winding at full throttle before every shift.

On the other side of the street, Ali stepped into the middle of the dirt driveway, brought the submachine gun to his shoulder, and aimed carefully.

Nguyen Duc Tran didn’t wait to find out if his windshield was bulletproof. He stuck Miguel Tejada’s Glock out his side window and, using his left hand, began squeezing off shots in Ali’s general direction. He didn’t expect to hit him, merely give him something else to think about.

Ali ignored the bullets whipping around him. Shooting the driver wouldn’t stop the truck — he realized that now. Paralyzed by indecision, he froze for a few critical seconds.

He was trying to jump aside when the front bumper of the massive tractor hit him and knocked him backward six feet, then the tractor ran over him. Nguyen Tran cranked the wheel over to make the turn onto the street and stayed on the gas. He didn’t even feel the thump as the right rear wheels of the tractor ran over Ali, killing him instantly.

Mohammed didn’t shoot. He, too, realized that killing the driver would cause the truck to crash, which would not help the cause.

As he stood watching the container carrying the nuclear weapon speed away down the wide street, a flower-delivery van skidded to a halt beside him. Akram was at the wheel.

Mohammed ran around the front of the vehicle and threw himself through the open door. “Follow that truck,” he shouted. “Someone’s stealing the weapon!”

“What about your men?” Akram demanded, looking at Ali’s corpse.

“They are already in Paradise. Follow that truck!”

Jake Grafton caught an executive jet at Andrews Air Force Base. Rita Moravia, Toad Tarkington’s wife, was waiting in the terminal. The two of them climbed aboard as Jake told Rita everything he had learned about the crash, which wasn’t much. “Toad was in back when the crash occurred. The guy with him, Harley Bennett, was killed. The driver was Sonny Tran. He called me from the hospital.” He told her what Sonny had relayed about Toad’s condition.

Rita took it well, he thought. She was a career naval officer, too, and she had been through her share of emergencies, been to her share of funerals and memorial services. Still, when it’s your husband, the father of your son, it’s not business as usual.

When the jet leveled at altitude, she tried to make conversation.

After they had discussed what Callie and Amy were up to these days, Jake asked about Rita. “Callie and I don’t see you often enough,” he said. “What are you doing these days?”

“Planning for Fleet Week in New York, the last week in May. With the mood of the country like it is, the administration wants to make a big deal out of it. And the New Yorkers need it.” She went on, explaining how many aircraft carriers and surface warships were going to be there. “The Canadians, Brits, French, and Germans are sending squadrons. The Israelis are sending a destroyer. Several ships from South America will come, even a couple from Japan.”

She welcomed the chance to stop speculating about her husband’s possible injuries and talked with some enthusiasm. Jake let her talk.

He had forgotten about Fleet Week. He had seen articles in the newspaper and heard people at the Pentagon talking, but none of it registered. He had his mind on other things.

“Tell me about security,” he prompted Rita.

“It’s going to be heavy. Fleet Week is obviously a terror target.” She went on, telling him how the warship anchorages would be sanitized. “No one wants a repeat of the USS Cole incident, especially in New York Harbor.”

A somber Jake Grafton sat staring at the bulkhead of the little plane.

A helicopter was waiting at Logan Airport to fly them to the hospital. Gil Pascal had been on the telephone, apparently. Sonny Tran was waiting beside the pad when the helo landed. He was whacked up, too, with a bandage on his forehead. “Ten stitches,” he told them. “Some glass they had to take out. I was damned lucky.”

He led them through the corridors, telling them about the accident and Toad’s condition. “He has four bruised ribs and a mild concussion. Some cuts, twenty or so stitches. He’ll make a full recovery, the doctor said.”

“What about the van and the Corrigan detector?”

“Totaled. The whole thing is junk.”

Jake stopped to talk to the doctor outside the ICU while Rita went in to see Toad. The doctor repeated Sonny’s report in more detail.

Sonny stayed in the corridor when Jake entered the ICU. He saw Rita bent over a bed, kissing Toad, who was hooked to an IV and heart monitor. She straightened as Jake approached, yet held tightly to her husband’s hand. He was conscious and alert. His face was badly swollen, and he had some stitches over his right eye. On the monitor his heartbeat and blood pressure looked steady and normal.

“Hey, boss,” Toad said. “Fate sorta reached out and whacked the ol’ Horny Toad.”

“So I hear. How you doing, shipmate?”

“Sore as hell. Woke up a little bit ago, just in time to get a kiss from the greatest woman on the planet.”

Jake leaned over the bed, as close to Toad as he could get. “Tell me about the accident.”

“I don’t remember much. We were in back, Harley and I, watching needles when the world caved in. Knocked me out. I must have regained conciousness at some point because I remember someone saying a garbage truck hit us.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sorta funny, though. I kinda remember Sonny goosing the thing just before the impact. He might have been trying to avoid the collision. I fell off the stool and was on the floor when the side of the thing just came smashing in on us. Harley was sitting on his stool.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How is he?”

“Harley?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s dead. Didn’t they tell you?”

“Maybe they did. I’ve been out of it. I don’t remember.”

“He’s dead. Sonny got a cut on the head.”

“Oh, Jesus!”

“It was an accident. Just concentrate on getting well. I need you back at the office.”

When he went out in the hallway Sonny was still there, sitting beside the nurses’ station with his head in his hands.

“Sorry, Admiral. I feel really bad about the accident. It’s hell, Bennett dying like that. That garbage truck came blowing down that hill and there was nothing I could do.”

“Toad said he felt you jam on the gas.”

“Well, yeah. I tried to get through the intersection ahead of the truck, but …” He shrugged.

“I understand.”

“Hell of a thing, I know. How about some time off? I’m not going to be able to keep my mind on business for a while.”

“Sure. A few days off will be good for you.”

“I need to chill.”

“You’ve been working pretty hard,” Jake said. “Take a couple weeks. Check in occasionally, tell me how you are doing.”

“Okay.” Sonny shook hands and wandered off.

Jake watched him go. He had no grounds to have him arrested, and that would be the only way to hold him. If he used his cell phone or credit cards, Zelda could track him. That would have to do.

He probably should get a copy of the police accident report, but that could wait. The hard fact was that he was down to precisely one Corrigan unit, and there were still four Sword of Islam bombs headed this way. And Fleet Week was coming! How in hell did he forget that?

He took the cell phone from his pocket and dialed Gil Pascal.

The nurse at the desk leaned toward him and spoke in a stage whisper. “Sir, would you take your phone to the visitors’ waiting room? The transmissions affect our telemetry.”

“Right,” Jake said.

She pointed, and he went.

Mohammed Mohammed and Akram conferred. They were in the van a hundred yards behind the truck with the bomb. The little parade was on a two-lane state highway headed north.

They discussed their options. If they drove alongside the tractor and shot the driver, the truck would crash. Could the five of them lift the bomb into the van before the police arrived? What if the weapon were damaged in the crash?

“If he stays on roads like this, he will come to a stoplight sooner or later,” Akram pointed out. “When he stops, we can drive up beside the cab and shoot him. The truck will be stopped, you can climb up and drive.”

“On an interstate highway he would have to stop at a weight station eventually,” Mohammed mused. “I don’t know where he is going, but if it is a long way he will have to stop for fuel.”

At the mention of the word “fuel,” Akram looked at the van’s gauge. Half a tank. “We will probably run out of fuel before he does,” he said gloomily. “If we stop he will drive on and escape us.”

None of the options looked good. The men in the back of the van had opinions, too, so the discussion grew heated as the miles rolled by. With all the uncertainties, the consensus was that they should wait. Something good would happen. The truck would stop for some reason. Allah Akbar!

In the cab of the tractor, Nguyen Duc Tran regularly checked his rearview mirrors. The flower-delivery van was back there a hundred yards or so, following faithfully. Where it had come from he had no idea, but he didn’t waste time fretting over bad luck.

The police were undoubtedly investigating the shooting at the construction site. Thank heavens he had taken all the copies of the manifests with him. Someone might have gotten the number on the license plates of the tractor or trailer, but he doubted it. The construction workers were diving for cover when he last saw them, probably convinced they were trapped at a drug shootout. He hoped they kept that thought firmly in mind. Those guys undoubtedly knew that people in south Florida who ratted on drug dealers had short life expectancies. They probably wouldn’t volunteer information to the police.

He again checked the van in the rearview mirror. As he drove he put a fresh magazine in the Glock, then laid the pistol on his lap. He reached behind his seat and brought up the Uzi. He had two magazines taped together, so after he emptied the first one he merely had to jerk it out and flip it over to insert a fresh one. He put the Uzi on the seat beside him.

He had bottled water to drink, a full tank of diesel fuel, and on these back roads he could avoid the weight stations.

If the ragheads were waiting for him to stop, they were going to wait quite a while.

He thought about what they might do. They wanted the container intact — that would limit their options.

After a half hour of this Akram and Mohammed reached a decision. Once they did Mohammed began making telephone calls on his cell phone. If they could get people ahead of this rig, they could ambush it, shoot out the tires of the tractor. That would be dangerous, but there was no help for it. With the rig stopped, the chassis carrying the container could be hooked to another tractor and driven away. They needed people to move fast to make it happen because the runaway nuclear weapon was proceeding north at sixty miles per hour.

Fahah Saqib, twenty-two years of age, believed in jihad against the kafirs, the infidels. He grew up in a small village on the edge of the desert, a son of tribesmen with the mark of the desert still on them. He wasn’t sure precisely what the American infidels had done to Islam, but all his life he had been told by uneducated, bearded holy men who had never been far from their village that the infidels were the enemy, and he had never questioned it. It was a fact of life, like the desert and the presence of Allah.

Nor did he question it these past six months, which he had spent in America enduring the worst kind of cultural shock. He knew nothing about the country, couldn’t speak the language, didn’t like the food, hated the music, and was horrified by the women, who were everywhere, in every public place and private shop. There was nowhere to escape them. They paraded their charms, wore revealing clothes, painted their faces and nails, tried to tempt men into sin. They were brazen sluts of the worst sort: And he had been forced to eat with them, deal with them, sit beside them, watch them tempt men they did not know … tempt him …

Fahah Saqib felt as if he were visiting the country of the devil where evil prevailed, where the greatness of Allah and the words of the prophet were despised. He had seen the children and girls smiling, snickering, pointing at him and his friends. He felt their amusement, their contempt. And he hated them. Kafirs!

This morning as he rode in the back of a van on its way somewhere — he didn’t know where and the leader hadn’t told him and it never occurred to him to ask — he thought about the weapon. He knew only what people said, that it was a superbomb that could wipe out a city and everyone in it. He had no idea how it worked or why. Naturally the kafirs made it, although they lacked the courage to use it.

The men of the Sword of Islam would show the world they had the courage and the power, Fahah Saqib thought. The kafirs who survived would know the fury of jihad and the power of Islam. Embrace Allah or be destroyed — that was the prophet’s message to the unbelievers, and it was Islam’s message now.

As the sun rose this Friday morning the leader, Saeed, briefed the men. The weapon would arrive this morning at a Wal-Mart in suburban Atlanta. They would be waiting for it when it arrived.

When it arrived, the men in this van would surround the container and prevent anyone from getting close, such as police or warehouse workers. They would be given weapons before the bomb arrived. While they were defending the bomb, Mohmad Salaah, the leader from the other van, would unload enough of the container’s contents to get to the weapon. He would hook the weapon to a series of automobile batteries, and trigger the capacitor. A few seconds later the weapon would detonate, destroying much of Atlanta. Naturally they would all die, too — a regrettable sacrifice, yet necessary — and proceed straight to Paradise.

Fahah Saqib was ready. He had lived as best he could and was ready for the eternal pleasures. Allah Akbar!

On the outskirts of Atlanta the van stopped for a few minutes. Salaah went to another vehicle and returned a few moments later. Weapons were passed out. Fahah Saqib was given a submachine gun and several magazines of ammunition. With the weapon in his hand he felt like a warrior, a warrior for Allah, and was almost overcome by emotion. He had to turn his head to keep the others from seeing the dampness of his eyes.

Soon the van was rolling again, each man cradling his weapon in his lap.

The Wal-Mart parking lot was practically empty when they arrived. A few vehicles were parked near the employees’ entrance and several abandoned or broken-down cars speckled the lot, but that was about it.

As directed, Fahah Saqib took up a post behind the Wal-Mart, near a large Dumpster. He lay down amid the weeds and trash beside the Dumpster and put his spare magazine on the ground beside him. He had already inserted one in the weapon. Now he chambered a round and put the safety on.

It had rained during the night, he noted. The asphalt was damp, with puddles here and there. The smell of garbage from the Dumpster was heavy in the moist air. Fahah Saqib had not eaten this morning, but the smell of rotting garbage made him lose his desire for food. There would be plenty in Paradise, he thought. However, after some reflection, he wondered if there were any food there at all. Pondering the question, he decided there probably was, because Allah knew men liked food.

The minutes ticked by slowly. Fahah Saqib looked repeatedly at his watch.

There were no other people in sight. Several times he heard airplanes, and once a helicopter a long way off. He didn’t look for them.

“Three of the cells are in Atlanta,” Hob Tulik told his boss, Myron Emerick, over the encrypted line. Emerick was in the FBI’s crisis management center in the Hoover Building in Washington, monitoring the situation. Tulik was still in Florida. “They are in a Wal-Mart parking lot, armed to the teeth, waiting for something. Perhaps waiting for a weapon to arrive.”

“Is it there now?”

“I don’t think so. They parked two of the vans in the center of the parking lot in front of the store and stationed men around the building and on the edge of the lot. They have made no attempt to enter the store or parked trucks or vehicles. Looks to me as if they are waiting. There’s a total of a dozen suspects, we believe, nine on guard and three by the vans.”

“All armed?”

“Yes, sir. Apparently so.”

“If the weapon is there, I want you to send the men in now.”

“I don’t think it’s there.”

“Why not move in now, arrest these men, then wait for the weapon?”

“Sir, I have no way of knowing what these suspects are waiting for.”

“Okay,” Emerick said. Sometimes you had to go with gut instincts because those were all you had. His brain told him Tulik was right and his gut told him the Atlanta suspects were waiting for a weapon.

He called the White House and got Sal Molina. He relayed what he knew.

“Where are the other weapons?” Molina wanted to know.

“We are not sure. We’ve got terrorists running around willy-nilly right now. Got people on’em … if they get within rifle shot of a nuke, we’ll bust’em.”

“Keep me advised. The president has asked me to keep him informed minute by minute.”

“Right,” said Myron Emerick, and hung up. He sat staring at the giant computer-generated map display that covered the far wall, and wondered aloud, “Where the devil are the other weapons?”

A few minutes before eight in the morning a tractor pulled onto the Wal-Mart property towing a chassis with a container on it. The driver raced his rig across the empty parking lot and only applied his brakes to slow for the turn down the narrow place beside the building. Fahah Saqib heard the vehicle coming and tightened his grip on his weapon.

The driver came into sight behind the building. With the tractor snorting diesel exhaust, it backed smartly to the loading dock. Leaving his rig running, the driver strolled inside to find someone to sign for his load.

That’s when two of the militants came walking around the building. They climbed into the tractor cab and put it in gear. They drove it slowly around the building and parked it next to their vehicles in the center of the lot.

Fahah Saqib saw the rig disappear around the building with Saleem and another man in the cab. He waited where he was. Fifteen seconds later the original driver of the tractor-trailer came out of the building, saw his rig was gone, and began running after it. Fahah Saqib stood up then, leveled the submachine gun with the butt against one hip, and triggered a burst at the man.

Missed him, of course.

He triggered another burst, which went so far over the man’s head that he didn’t see the bullets strike.

The driver turned and ran for his life back toward the loading dock. Saqib tried two more bursts, one of which made a hail of sparks against the concrete loading dock. The driver threw himself up on the dock with surprising agility, rose instantly to his feet, and lunged for the door.

When he disappeared, Fahah Saqib lowered his weapon and thoughtfully removed the magazine. He inspected it, then replaced it with a full one. Well, he had only fired a submachine gun once before, one magazine, about a year ago.

He was leaning against the container, watching the loading dock, when an FBI sniper shot him from three hundred yards away. He didn’t hear the shot. The bullet went through both lungs and his heart. He collapsed, wondering what had happened. Ten seconds later his heart stopped.

Two helicopters swooped down across the roof, headed for the main parking lot. In less than thirty seconds five of the militants were dead, four more were wounded, and the remainder had thrown down their weapons. One ran. Local police arrested him a half mile away in the middle of an overgrown vacant lot.

The agent in charge of the operation, George Ekimov, opened the container. It was packed with light office furniture, cheap stuff made of soft wood. His men began unloading the furniture while an agent with a powerful spotlight and a video camera recorded everything.

Halfway through the load they came to beanbag chairs. The first ones that the agents unloaded seemed unremarkable, but then they tried to pick up one that was too heavy for two men to lift. It took four men to scoot the thing out of the trailer.

Ekimov used a knife on the fake leather covering. He reached into the cut and pulled out a handful of the pellets. They were made of soft metal, blown with air to give them bulk. He used his pocketknife on one of them.

Lead.

More chairs were removed, revealing a mound of canvas bags taped into position with an extraordinary amount of duct tape. Ekimov used his knife to cut away a bag. He examined it under the video camera’s spotlight. The bag contained twenty-five pounds of #8 lead birdshot.

When the bags of birdshot were completely removed, there sat the warhead, bolted to the floor of the container. It was smaller than Ekimov thought it would be. Between the warhead and the container floor was a half-inch-thick sheet of lead. Each of the four or so dozen high-explosive detonators that surrounded the round warhead was wired to a black box — a sea of yellow wires. Ekimov assumed the box was a complex capacitor designed to send electrical impulses to all the detonators at the appropriate nanosecond. There didn’t appear to be a battery or source of electrical power, although there were wires protruding from the box that one might use as a connection point.

One of the agents told him there were a dozen car batteries in one of the vans. “Maybe they were going to detonate it right here,” the agent said to Ekimov.

“Perhaps,” he said. “Start questioning the survivors. Where are the other weapons? Find one that speaks English and get it out of him.”

“Miranda warnings?”

“No. This is war. They’re enemy soldiers until somebody in Washington says different. Where are the other bombs? Find out, Goddammit!”

“Yes, sir.”

While the photographer circled the weapon and continued taking video from every angle, Ekimov got on the encrypted telephone to Hob Tulik. When he finished that call, he made another, to the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team that was standing by at Naval Air Station Jacksonville. While he was talking he heard a rumble of thunder.

Holy …! A lightning bolt in this vicinity might set this thing off, he thought.

“Better hurry,” he told the EOD team leader.

The parking lot shooting in Atlanta was soon on local television stations. A traffic helicopter in the vicinity got footage of the FBI agents unloading the container. No one in law enforcement whispered the word “nuclear,” and several hinted at drugs, so that became the story — FBI and local cops had seized a container full of drugs. Soon the video from the helicopter was on the broadcast and cable networks.

Jake Grafton was in the executive terminal at the Boston airport when he got a call from Gil Pascal alerting him to the story. As it happened a television in the pilot’s lounge was tuned to MSNBC, which was running the helicopter video. The container was an ominous presence. Although the voice-over commentator was rambling about drugs, Jake Grafton wasn’t fooled.

His cell phone rang again. Harry Estep from the FBI this time, with news. The FBI had a nuke — it was in that shipping container that was on television.

“It was sitting on a lead plate, surrounded with lead birdshot and blown lead pellets. That’s probably how it came into the country.”

Jake Grafton grunted. He had suspected something like that, but why say so?

“Emerick thinks all the weapons are in the country. He hopes to get them in the next twenty-four hours, he says.”

“By God, I hope he does,” Jake said fervently.

“We’re running complex surveillances on a couple of groups that are going somewhere in a big hurry right now. Perhaps to collect bombs. I’ll keep you advised.”

“Right.”

It must have been Jake’s tone, because Estep continued earnestly, “Soon as I know something, I’ll call you.”

“Right,” Jake said, and flipped the mouthpiece shut.

Fleet Week, he thought as he stood watching the video from the helicopter circling the Georgia Wal-Mart parking lot. If a nuke went off in New York Harbor amid a hundred warships, the public would think it had been an accidental explosion of an American weapon aboard a U.S. Navy ship. There would be no one left alive to tell a different story. The blast in New York Harbor and the subsequent radioactive and political fallout would deal the American economy a devastating blow. U.S. Navy warships would be banned from most of the world’s ports, including, probably, those in California and Puget Sound. America’s ability to protect her interests around the world would be paralyzed, perhaps fatally so. Since America was the foremost defender of liberal civilization, that, too, would be in jeopardy.

One bomb … and the era of Pax Americana would end in a mushroom cloud.